Monthly Archives: January 2015

Giant Squid and Rode smartLav+ lavilier mics.

Recently I bought myself a Giant Squid lavalier microphone. The version I got was the mono, cardioid model and came in at around $(US)40. This makes it about half the price of the Rode smartLav+ (itself around $80, so not exactly expensive). Physically it is a bit larger than the Rode, though I could put it the other way around and say how amazed I was at how small the Rode was. This will mean that, compared to the Rode, this Giant Squid will be a bit harder to hide if you want a your microphone to be concealed and out of view.

Being a cardioid device it will cut out much of the background sounds. One area where this can be really useful and that’s in a room with a bit of an echo to it. This device seems quite good at cancelling out that often rather unnatural ‘hollow’ sound.

Compared to the Rode the overall sound seems warmer, though looking at it the other way I could say the Rode gives a crisper sound. One area where the Rode really does outperform the Giant Squid is outside in the wind. Here the Rode is far less susceptible to that wind noise that can so overpower any outside recording. On the other hand the omnidirectional characteristics of the Rode means that if in a crowded street you may find it hard to hear your speaker’s voice above that of those around you. In this situation the cardioid pattern of the Giant Squid could work in your favour.

The Giant Squid is designed to plug straight into a standard audio recorder (I regularly use a Zoom H1) where the Rode smartLav+ is looking to feeding into a smartphone or tablet device. One big problem here is that the codecs used by phones for recording audio can (and do) vary vastly across models. Far by the best results I’ve had have been when using Rode’s adapter lead which enables the smartLav+ to plug into the Zoom.

Which of these two lavalier microphones is best – that really depends on your own situation, what you want and how you use them. At this sort of price you can’t expect perfection, however for speech recording they both provide a vast step up compared to a camera’s built in microphone.

(When I have some spare time and money I’d like to get an omnidirectional Giant Squid and compare that to these two.)